


A Length of String Between Two Points

by ishouldwritethatdown



Series: Souls Entangled [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Adoption, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character "Death", El & Will Are Supernaturally Connected, F/M, Family Feels, Gap Filler, Gen, Grief/Mourning, POV Multiple, Parent-Child Relationship, Post-Battle of Starcourt, Psychic Bond, Season Finale, String of Fate, references to violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-06-28 09:16:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19809286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: Joyce adopts Eleven without even thinking about it - it makes such perfect sense to her and the Byers boys that they don't even discuss it, it just happens. Right there, in the parking lot of Starcourt Mall, El becomes family. And then it's getting home and sleeping and then extracting pieces of herself from the ruins of Hopper's cabin, and trying to figure out what "home" means now.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like we're all in the same denial boat, here. And I'm upset that we didn't get more/any El and Will sibling bonding this season, which we DESERVED. So, here. My personal attempt to remedy that with the time I had on a Sunday.

She looked lost at sea. Treading water in a flood of unnatural blue light, leaning on her uninjured leg as she turned this way and that, searching the faceless bodies zipping back and forth for the familiar. El’s eyes, already shining with a short lifetime of grief and hurt, found hers. And she knew.

She knew home wasn’t coming back.

And Joyce clung to half of her own home, her youngest boy, and watched El’s world crash down around her yet again. Face screwing up like paper in a fist, hair swishing as she shook her head _no, no, no…_

Joyce slid her hand down the length of Will’s arm and gripped his hand tight as she pulled back from the embrace, and a moment ago she couldn’t have taken another step but now she was half-running across the lot, towards the little girl-turning-teenager who’d been so brave and fought so hard and brought her baby boy back to her.

Joyce had noticed the way Will and El’s eyes tended to linger on each other at innocuous moments, like they couldn’t quite believe the other was real. Trying to puzzle out the other half of their own equation, the person whose fate had become so tangled up in theirs. But even she was surprised to find Will moving to El with the same determination once he read the look on her face, not being dragged by her hand but merely anchored by it.

El’s chest hiccupped with the first sob and her arms opened just slightly right as their momentum carried them into her. Joyce folded her in close with her free arm while Will looped his around her back, and she and stroked her hair with a trembling hand she tried to soothe. Her tears smothered her voice as she whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”

El’s shoulders shook, and Will was holding tighter as if he were trying to shield them both from the cold, but his own breaths were short and wet as well.

“It’s okay, I’m sorry, it’s going to be okay…”

“It’s _not_ okay!” El choked, and her breath squeaked out her throat. She clutched tighter, buried her face in deeper to Joyce’s shoulder. The voice that muffled into her jacket was _angry_. “Where is he?!”

Hopper’s smile flashed into her consciousness; and it _had_ been a smile, not the grimace of a dead man killed before he knew his daughter was safe, or the sardonic grin of a pessimist saying _I told you so_. It was a sad, watery kind of smile, the kind that accompanied a single breath of laughter and a humoured, “So much for dinner, then, huh?”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and couldn’t manage anything else. She closed her eyes and held the back of El’s head and tried to take a deep breath. She just held her, tight and quiet except for all the crying, and tried not to say the words _I’m sorry, Hop,_ out loud. She squeezed Will’s hand, and he squeezed tighter. The kids started to flock together, being drawn by El and Will, which pulled in the teenagers all clinging to one another as well. She wished she had more hands, so that she could hold Jonathan’s face in them without letting go of her youngest two.

“Are you kids all alright?” she managed, and poor Max looked like her knees would cave in without Lucas and Mike holding her up on each side, but they all nodded vaguely or muttered assurances and nobody mentioned the big, empty space where Hopper should have been although they’d all left a space for him to stand without thinking about it. “Right,” she nodded, trying to gather her thoughts into an action plan. “Right, who’s got the keys? Let’s get everybody home. I’ll drop you all off…”

“I’ll drive, Mrs. Byers,” said Nancy, and it almost sounded like a command. She flipped the car keys into her hand and repeated with a slight wobble in her voice, “I’ll drive.” And maybe that’s what she needed to feel in control, to feel okay, because the wobble only seemed to make her more determined. As many of them crammed into the station wagon as they could; Jonathan and Nancy in the front, she, Will and El in the middle, and Lucas, Mike, and Max in the back. Steve assured them that he could drive himself and Murray and Robin in the “Toddfather”, and would pick up Dustin and Erica on the way. Lucas gave Steve a stern warning about getting Erica home on time, and he waved him off, muttering about someone called Tina, and Uncle Jack’s party.

Joyce rubbed circles on El’s hand with her thumb all the way home, and Will clasped her other hand. Sandwiched in between them, and with Mike and Lucas at her back, El let herself relax a little in her exhaustion, slumping just slightly against Will. Joyce found herself dozing in and out of forming plans of defence in case some other unleashed horror jumped at the car before the night was through.

Jonathan and Nancy’s goodbye was shorter than their standard. Mike and El’s was almost nonexistent, nothing more than a promise to come over with Nancy the next day as El kept her eyes low, her arm against Will’s. She nodded, and Joyce closed the car door, raising a hand to wave them off down the track. She put an arm around El’s shoulders and led her inside. The ache of _someone missing_ threatened to rise up in her throat, and she squashed it down. _Not now. The children need you. Be Mom now. Be Joyce later._

Jonathan helped her amass a selection of quilts and pillows for El to choose from, and Will made grilled cheeses with expert culinary skill, filling the kitchen with warmth that spilled into the living room. They all bundled onto the sofa in exhausted, comfortable silence to eat their midnight snack, and then Jonathan mumbled that he was going to get some sleep and wandered to the bathroom to drag a toothbrush over his teeth.

El thumbed the plain blue hairband on her wrist as Joyce told her that if she needed anything in the night, she should come and find her, and not to worry if she had to wake her up. El nodded, pulling her chosen blankets tight around her and shuffling deeper into the comfiest part of the sofa.

Joyce rested her hand on the wall close to the light switch and gave Will a, _Time for bed, mister,_ smile. He got up from the arm of the couch obligingly, but looked back at El, eyes lingering on hers again. “Goodnight, El,” he said.

“Goodnight.”

* * *

El had waited for the nightmares to come, but they’d left her alone in the inky black void of total unconsciousness instead. Sheer exhaustion carried her sleep through until summer sunlight streamed through the windows, when she sat up in a whirlwind of unfamiliar sensations. _Not home. Not safe. Escape—_

“You’re okay, sweetie,” Joyce hushed, hastily stepping into her line of sight and kneeling down beside the sofa. “You’re safe.”

Why was she here? Where was— “Hop,” she croaked, searching her face, begging her to say it wasn’t true, it wasn’t right, all of it was a terrible mistake…

Joyce just pressed her lips together and regarded her with kind, sad eyes. El curled in on herself and clutched her legs while Joyce rubbed her shoulder. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t _fair_. He wasn’t supposed to go, he _promised_ , he _promised_ he would always come back.

_Friends don’t lie._

_But they make stupid promises, sometimes._

“I got Eggos,” Joyce said, tilting her head to try and catch her eyes. “You still like Eggos, right?”

Reluctantly, she raised her eyes to meet Joyce’s, and nodded. She smiled at her, led her into the kitchen with a hand on her back. Her blanket still rested on her shoulders, protective, while she dug into her breakfast – three stacked waffles, sandwiched with whip cream, and Smarties, and fresh berries.

“Mike came by, earlier,” Joyce told her. “But you were still asleep. You want to call him?”

She thought about it. About the way he chatted, awkward but cute, and played with her fingers and her lips. He’d want to touch and talk and kiss her better, and Hopper would say _three inches, kids,_ and—

No he wouldn’t. Hopper wouldn’t say anything. Ever.

“Parents are the worst,” Mike had said once, lying on his back on her bed, staring at the ceiling after Hop had called through the wall that they better stop “sucking face” soon or their mouths would be too numb to eat dinner. El had giggled, and Mike had groaned. “They never give you any _freedom_ ,” he continued.

Mike exaggerated; he did it a lot. It was sometimes hard to tell, but she was getting better at it. This was an example. He rolled onto his stomach and looked her in the face. “Come on, you’ve gotta agree. Your dad keeps you here like a prisoner, practically!”

El had shrugged. Hopper said she had to stay away from downtown and the mall, so she did. Her year of ‘laying low’ would be up in the fall. That wasn’t too far away, now, and anyway, being around lots of people was scary. She didn’t mind staying away from all of that.

She shook her head at Joyce. No Mike today. She nodded, not asking for an explanation, and scooped up a handful of berries to pop individually into her mouth. “Okay. Well… I’m thinking I should go to the cabin today, pick up some more clothes for you, anything else you might need.” She spoke delicately. Like treading around broken glass. “You can give me a list, or you can come. Up to you.”

Stuffing her colourful new clothes into a duffel bag was the easy part, but to get to it, she had to step around the debris of Hopper’s grandfather’s furniture, feel the breeze whistle through the holes punched in the wall and the roof. Edge carefully around a splatter of Flayer-infected blood that _looked_ dead, but not for sure.

The new clothes were easy – at least once Joyce showed her how to fold them so they could all fit neatly into the bag. The old jeans and tees and dungarees went in without a fuss, as well, although she let herself be convinced that she didn’t need the ones that were too small or filled with holes anymore. She folded her Snow Ball dress several times before she was satisfied with it, but eventually, that was packed too. Then came the button-ups, and everything ground to a halt. They had to pick through the house to gather them all up, creating a pile that was little less that totally unreasonable for one person to have. But then, they’d belonged to _two_ people, before.

“Right,” Joyce said, regarding their mountainous task. She held up the one of the top of the pile, dark blue plaid. “Want to keep this one?”

“Yes.”

The next one was white and blue with a thin red stripe.

“Yes.”

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Joyce put down the sixth shirt in the ‘Yes’ pile and hummed. “Okay. I know it’s hard to let go of things, but that’s not what we’re doing right now, okay? We’re just picking your favourites. We can pack the rest away in a box, and come back for them later. Yeah?”

Favourites. They were _all_ her favourites.

Joyce smiled at her, and got up from the floor. “Take your time. I’ll go and deal with the fridge.”

So she sat, cross-legged on her bedroom floor. She took a brown and blue plaid shirt off the top of the pile and thought about it; thought about which one of them had worn it last. Some of the shirts were firmly hers, too small for Hop to fit in any more, but others seemed to change custody on the regular. She buried her face in it and breathed in. _Hopper_. It smelled like him so strongly that for a second, just a second… it was almost like she was snuggling into the real thing.

And then she wasn’t. And the tears fell.

When she finished packing the ones she’d chosen – the first one he’d given her, after the bath and Will and Castle Byers, was coming with her, even though it was raggedy – she dumped the remaining shirts into a box without folding them and picked out hair ties and bracelets and stuffed all the other knick-knacks and drawings from her room into her bag. She stood in the doorway of her bedroom and watched Joyce finish filling a box with groceries. She smiled at El, and then looked into the rest of the cabin and sighed. El looked at her ( _What’s wrong?_ ) and she shook her head.

“I thought we’d be able to clean all this up, get it all… sorted, packed away.” She bit her lip and sat down at the table, and laughed shortly, sniffed. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen.” Surveying the mess, Eleven agreed. It was a lot to do in one day, and it had taken much longer than that to unpack everything when Hopper first took her here…

But that wasn’t what Joyce meant, she realised. Sorting through everything in the cabin, feeling _Hopper_ in all of it, that was the hard part. There were memories attached to all these little things, these little bits of home. Something she’d looked at closely while they unpacked all the boxes together, or something of his grandfather’s that Hopper told a story about, or just something she’d particularly noticed while they played Battleships or Scrabble or the Game of Life. There was that mug that Hopper had snatched out of the air when she knocked it off the counter, before she had time to use her powers to catch it, and she _had_ to keep it, it was a piece of home…

And it only made her heart ache harder.

“We’ll have to just take what’s important and… come back for the rest.”

Important. El weighted that word carefully, and then made a decision. She grabbed a flashlight from the floor, pulled up the hatch, and jumped down.

“El?” Joyce said, alarmed, her voice muffled by the wooden boards between them. She didn’t respond; she was looking at the boxes, from label to label, until she found the one marked ‘Hawkins Lab’. She pushed it up into confused, receiving hands, and checked more labels. ‘New York’, ‘Vietnam’, ‘Dad’… She considered that one, but left it. These were all pieces of Hopper, but there was one in particular she was trying to find.

She pulled a threadbare blanket off the top of one stack of boxes, kicking up a thick layer of dust that made her cough. She waved it out of her face and found the box she was looking for. It was the only one that looked carefully looked after, and had a nice flower pattern instead of plain, ratty brown. Carefully, she lifted the box up to Joyce, and heard a sharp intake of breath when she read the name. ‘Sara’.

When she pulled herself out of the hatch and closed it, she looked at Joyce, sitting on the sofa with the Lab box stacked on top of the other. She said, “Important,” as she sat down next to her, and Joyce nodded.

“That everything, then, kiddo?” she asked, and she was smiling but there were tears clogging up her voice a little. Her mouth twitched, at the same time as Joyce winced. _Kiddo_. “Sorry,” she said. “I won’t call you that again. You’re not a little kid any more.”

No. She wasn’t.

_You want to go out in the world? Then you better grow up! Grow the **hell** **up!**_

“Joyce?” she said quietly.

“Yeah, honey?” she smiled softly, open. Hurting, she could _see_ that in the tears that brimmed out of nowhere, but not turning a sharp edge to anyone.

“Can I… stay with you?”

Joyce stared at her for a moment, blinking, and a slight frown creased her forehead, her lips parted in an almost-word. El clenched her jaw, fearing she’d said something wrong—

“Of _course_ ,” she said, and El wasn’t all that good with deciphering tones of voice, but she sounded surprised. Surprised that she had to ask. She took El’s hands in hers, clasping them tightly like she had before the bath. Sincerity. Trust. Thankfulness. “Of course you can, El, sweetheart. I’d never send you away, not ever. You hear me? Not _ever_. You’re part of my family now.”

El smiled.

“Come on,” she said, squeezing her hands before releasing them. “Let’s get all of this into the car and get home.”

She nodded.

Home.

Family.

Families ate meals together, and watched movies together, and laughed together. This was what Eleven learned. She had done those things with Hopper, but she hadn’t had a name for that. Hopper was just Hopper, and she hadn’t known that dozing off in front of the TV was a family activity, but it sure seemed to be because Jonathan did it too, and then Will pelted bits of popcorn at him until he woke up with a start and glared. Will and Joyce laughed, and he suppressed his own smile before picking the popcorn off his clothes and the chair and stuffing them into his mouth.

The TV faded to black after the movie finished and Will dutifully wound the tape back before replacing it in its case. She and Will brushed their teeth side-by-side, and El watched themselves in the mirror, squinting at the refracted light that seemed to glint off the glass. Joyce tucked El into her blankets and reminded her to come and find her if she needed anything.

“Thank you,” she said.

Joyce smiled, and stroked her hair back out of her face. “You are so very welcome.” She pressed a kiss to her forehead, and then El _did_ feel like a little kid; the little kid that Hopper read stories to before bedtime, and taught Morse code, and made Eggos for by the dozen.

Joyce said, “Goodnight,” and turned out the light.

When the house settled into sleeping silence, she closed her eyes and breathed until the buzz of the heating or the electronics in the house became the fuzzy hum of radio static. She rode white noise into the dark in-between place, and walked. She didn’t know what she was looking for, just looked into silence and darkness and walked on, ever further. There had to be something she was looking for, and it was like it was right there, smoke beneath her fingertips… If she could just stay focused, maybe she could find it.

The radio whined and purred, and she frowned, trying not to let the sudden change in noise distract her—

“El. El, are you there? I need your help, kid. El?”

She jolted awake, and fumbled for the radio that wasn’t there. It was back in the cabin, and she _wasn’t_ in the cabin, she was at the Byers’ house, and this was her new home and _why_ didn’t it feel like home? This was _supposed_ to be home!

She sobbed and curled upright against the back cushions, wishing to fall back asleep so that she could hear Hopper’s voice again, but at the same time not. She didn’t want the ghost of his voice in her memories, she wanted him _here_ , with her. Not gone. Never gone.

She saw movement and gasped, clutching the blankets close. Will was standing at the foot of the sofa, in his pyjamas. “Sorry,” he whispered, sounding sleepy, and she didn’t really need to ask how he’d known she’d woken up as he sat down at her feet. They were tied together, the two of them. Tangled up in invisible string. She could feel it.

After a few moments of sitting in silence in the dark, El stopped holding her breath for fear of crying, and let it burst out of her. “I want my dad,” she whimpered between sniffles.

“I know,” said Will wiggling backwards and teasing his way under the blankets so that he could sit beside her properly. His hand brushed down her wrist until he clasped his fingers around hers. His hands were warm; she’d noticed that before. Not like the Mind-Flayer. Not like at Castle Byers, where he’d evaporated into smoke. He was real, and human, and warm. “But don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll protect you, and you’ll protect me. We’re family now.”

“Family,” she wiped her nose and nodded. “Family protects each other.”

“Yeah,” he said, and he was smiling at her in the dark. “That’s right.”

And family means home.

* * *

Joyce found her youngest on the sofa that morning, as she got ready for work. They were leaning against each other, hands interlaced tightly together and sleeping soundly. She muttered thoughtfully to herself as she left the house, trying to remember where she had put the old camping mattress and hoping it hadn’t got damp or nibbled on. She’d ask Will and El if they’d like her to move into his bedroom tonight, she thought. There wouldn’t be a lot of room, but she had a feeling that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, at least for now.

She wished Hopper was here to see them. See them _safe_ , and faintly smiling in their sleep. The sight might just give him the peace of mind to get a full night’s sleep of his own. At that, she felt a faint _tug_ that she didn’t really understand, as if from her heart to someone else’s. She shivered in the warm morning air, got in her car, and drove to work.

* * *

_El, El, El, El, El,_ he thought, because his throat was raw and scratchy from murmuring for hours with no water. _Are you there? Find me, El, I need you, I need you, please find me._

And she wasn’t listening for him, why would she be listening for him? When she’d been hurt by the Mind-Flayer in the in-between place, and she was still recharging her batteries, and he was _dead_ , for Pete’s sake, why would anyone be listening?

And maybe he’d try to guess when 7pm on Friday came around, or maybe it would pass him by unawares, or maybe he’d already been in a coma for a week before he woke up in this hellhole and the date had passed him by.

“Sorry, Joyce,” he mumbled, hoarse, as his stomach snarled at him like it was his fault the damn Russians hadn’t given him any food. “Didn’t mean t’ stand you up.” He huffed, more a shudder than a laugh. A few breaths. He was tired, _so_ tired, and that didn’t make any sense because all he could _do_ was sleep and send out prayers that his little girl-turned-teenager might, if he was lucky, _astronomically_ lucky, hear.

 _Wish you were here, Joyce,_ he thought, feeling a compass-needle inside his chest swing round to her, to the direction he needed to be moving; and that didn’t make sense either, because of course he didn’t feel that, that was absurd, and of course he didn’t wish she was _here_ , that would be awful, but he was starting to lose faith that anything made sense in this screwed up world he lived in, anyway. So what was one nonsensical brain in the mix?

He knew she was looking after El. Truth be told she should probably have been doing it to begin with, she was way better at this parenting shit than he was. But he was responsible for that kid as long as he was breathing, and that meant he needed to get _home_. Stat.

 _I can hold out for you, kiddo_ , he told El in his mind. _I’m gonna get back to you. I just need you to listen._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all wanted more? i can't believe how many people subscribed to this story despite the fact that it was basically a one-shot. but i had inspo for a part 2, so. here we are. hope you enjoy!

“Hey, listen. If anything happened to me, would you look after El?”

The question had come out of nowhere. Here they were, sitting on the porch wrapped in blankets and sipping hot cocoa, while their youngest fixed accessories to their snowman. Will was the creative director of the two of them, with his prior snowman-building experience.

Joyce tightened her fingers around her mug and inhaled chocolatey warmth, trying to flatten the nerves that had risen up immediately. “Hop, don’t talk like that.”

He conceded, tired, “I know, I know. It’s just—I need to have a contingency. Things…” he sighed, looking down to his hands, “…tend to fall apart around me.”

She could sit here and argue that point with him. His life didn’t fall apart with any more frequency than life tended to in general. Everything always slid towards chaos, didn’t someone once write that? And if she believed that this fabled curse of his did exist, it stood to reason that her family was afflicted with something close to it. And she refused to believe that. They were not cursed. They were not _doomed_. They were just living.

But she didn’t need to argue Hopper out of a hole, right now. That wouldn’t help him. It wouldn’t help the kids who were about to be pelted with a sneak attack of snowballs from Jonathan, either.

“Of course I would.” She jostled his shoulder with hers, smiling at him even though he wouldn’t take his eyes off the yard. “You didn’t have to ask.”

He brought his cup to his lips as Will and El squealed, and El turned on Jonathan with a veritable avalanche. “Yeah, well. Neither do you.”

It was funny. Joyce didn’t remember that conversation until she was going through the Sara box in her bedroom. There was a photograph, of Hop with a beaming smile on his clean-shaven face, hoisting a bright-faced, screaming little girl under the arms of her puffy winter jacket. The date said _February 1976_. Sara would’ve been five. So would Will.

So would El.

Hop hated photos. He’d hated them his whole adult life, she’d thought. Ducked out of the way of any cameras pointed in his direction, hid behind his hat or his jacket, muttering something about all photos being used to blackmail him ten years down the line.

“School picture day,” he shook his head morbidly, “it’s traumatic, I’m telling you.”

“Only because you insisted on having your photo taken like _that_ ,” she’d rolled her eyes. She’d tried to tell him he’d regret it. But since when did Jim Hopper listen to anyone?

She should’ve seen the way he skirted around the truth. He was so good at it, always had been. He’d had a lot of practice. Using half-truths, leading people to their own conclusions that they wouldn’t push. She’d demanded of him, more than once – before he left for the Army, and after – why he couldn’t just be _straightforward_. He hadn’t answered, obviously. In their teenage years, it was probably mostly just to stay out of trouble. Later, it was to stay out of the hurt. No photographs, because he’d remember the half-finished photo album in his closet. No photographs, because they trapped your happiness behind film, where you could never get it again.

“Did you know her?”

She jumped. El had a habit of creeping around the house quietly that was going to be hard to get used to. Maybe when she settled in, she’d feel safe making noise around the house. As it was, she tried to disturb everything as little as possible. If you didn’t see her, you wouldn’t even know she lived here.

“Sara. Did you know her?” El repeated, because Joyce evidently looked lost at the question, too caught up in observations about the newest addition to her family.

“Oh—ah, no,” she said, looking back at the photo album she had propped open as El sat down beside her on the bed. One photo captured the Hoppers’ kitchen, Hop mid-wiggle in that awful so-called dancing he did, and Sara trying to copy. A sliver of Diane’s face was visible in the reflection of the glassfront cabinet, cracking up with laughter while she took the photo. It occurred to Joyce that she had never seen Diane smile before.

She amended her answer, “Well, I met her once, when she was really little. Hop, and his wife and Sara, they were in Hawkins for a couple days. Flew in to Indianapolis from New York. For a… a funeral.”

“Funeral,” El echoed.

She didn’t know if she just didn’t know the word, or was trying to commit it to memory, so she explained. “Yeah it’s ah, a kind of ceremony. When somebody you’re close to… is gone. Their body, it’s put in the ground or burned. This funeral, it was for Hop’s dad. It’s a thing people do to…”

How to explain the complex reasoning behind funeral rites? She winced.

“People do it for lots of reasons. It’s… part of grieving, a lot of the time.”

El nodded, soaking in that information. _Grieving_ was a concept she’d already been introduced to. _Intimately_. “Hop… has a funeral?”

There it was. She exhaled and put a hand on El’s knee. “It’s this Sunday.”

She saw her swallow. Her voice didn’t break much higher than a whisper when she said, “No body.”

Oh, God. “No. No, they’ll bury an empty coffin, I think. Look, sweetie—" Her heart stuttered at the eyes that snapped immediately to hers, drowning in tears that she was trying not to lose. She softened her voice as far as it would go. “There will be lots of people there. People you don’t know, from all over town, maybe even some people from the city. We don’t have to go. We can have our own memorial for Hop, just us. There’s no pressure.”

She nodded, but her eyes had already caught on the box, eager to move on, and she reached for something in it – pulled out the stuffed tiger. It was strange how much it reminded her of Will’s King, the lion who had spent more than one soggy night in Castle Byers. El turned the tiger around in her hands, ran her hand along its back.

“Can I have?” she asked.

“Uhh, yeah, yeah, sure,” she replied, surprised. El didn’t seem like one for cuddly toys, but then, she was entitled to a bit of catching up in that department. She gave Joyce an awkward kind of smile as she got up from the bed and left the room with the tiger hugged close, and she had a funny feeling it was supposed to be comforting. But the way her eyes squinted, almost pained, just reminded her of Hopper, and she tried not to grimace.

When the door shut behind her, she exhaled slowly, folding the sudden rise of emotions away into an ever-crowding corner of her mind. Joyce turned the page of the photo album and saw the first blank space. The photo before it was captioned _April 3 rd, 1977_. The backdrop was homely, and Sara was grinning at somebody out of frame as the candles on her birthday cake glowed in front of her. You almost couldn’t tell, but – underneath her paper party hat, Joyce could just see her bandanna. _First course of chemotherapy over._ _Last birthday_. It was all but explicitly captioned.

“I’ll come with you,” he’d said, when he’d clocked her shaking hands the day of Will’s first checkup at the lab. She’d told him she just needed a cigarette. He’d shrugged and said he didn’t have anything better to do. Hawkins PD was all tumbleweeds this morning, he said.

And she was thinking about breathing tubes and heart monitors and hospital gowns and how Hop hadn’t said a word about it and he’d kept on coming, _insisted_ on coming, when Will had his episodes. He’d sat there, quiet and calm with pointed questions to the doctors who called him _Pop_ as a joke, and gave soft almost-smiles to Will like he didn’t always remember how to do it, but he wanted to try anyway. Like El, just now. Not quite pained.

They’d explained PTSD to her in as much detail as she could wrap her head around. The flashbacks, the sudden moods, triggered by seemingly innocuous things. The way a traumatised person might want to shut down, stop seeing and hearing and feeling anything at all just to avoid the hurt, and how she mustn’t let Will pull away that far…

 _“A heart-to-heart? What_ is _that?”_

And all that time Hop was coming to the hospital with her and Will, he’d been raising El, too, watching shorn hair grow out as he read her stories and taught her big words. Remembering that last birthday, when they thought it was over, finally over, and Sara could go back to going to school and winning the Spelling Bee and playing make-pretend with her friends…

Joyce pressed her hand to her mouth to try and stifle the sobs that were squeezing her chest and dripping from her eyes. She tried to pack the feelings away, cram them into boxes, and this was all her own fault for going into this box in the first place, wasn’t it?

She was thinking about his stoic hero tough-guy schtick. _“Something happens to me, I don’t make it back—”_

_Then what, Hopper? What am I supposed to do now?_

* * *

“Are you sure about this?” Will asked, when El held out her hand for the blindfold. Her fingers curled in at the question, a frown creasing her face. Betrayal. “I just mean,” he hurried, not wanting to imply that he didn’t _want_ to find Hopper, “is it a good idea to try and look for someone before you’ve… recharged? What if—what if something tries to hurt you in there?”

Her face relaxed, recognising his words as concern, and she repeated, “The Gate is closed.”

Right. Mom and the Chief closed it. And the Mind-Flayer and all the Flayed – they’re gone. _Everything_ from the Upside Down was gone. But Hopper wasn’t. They just _knew_ he wasn’t. He handed her the blindfold, and tuned the radio to static.

He’d seen the idea occur to her while they were flipping through the music collection that Jonathan had rescued from the Hopper cabin. “This is a travesty, El,” he’d said, shaking his head at Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and just about every other record in the box. “A travesty. Didn’t the Chief let you listen to any _real_ music?”

She seemed to think about that for a moment, and then her fingers dove into the box, searching for a specific record, until she plucked out a single.

“No. No, no, no, El, I’m begging you, I’m literally begging you to be joking,” Jonathan groaned.

“This is music,” she said, placing Jim Croce under the needle, and while Jonathan drove his face into his pillow, muffling a despairing scream, El grinned and held out her hands for Will. He took them and slipped in beside her to support her bad leg, grinning back. They bopped and twisted to the combo of drums and guitar that formed an upbeat tune, much to Jonathan’s embarrassment. Will didn’t know it well, but the chorus was easy enough to pick up, and El didn’t seem to mind when he mumbled the parts he didn’t know.

“… _and you don’t mess around with Jim_ ,” he sang, leaning over to Jonathan when his eye rose out of the pillow to peek at them, and then he buried his face again.

“You are _not_ my family,” he told them. Will laughed, and El took the cue when she saw it was a joke.

As the song neared its end, she fell out of rhythm and slowed her bouncing. The bright glow of her smile faded at the same time, and when the music crackled near the end of the track, it fell off her face completely, and she stared into nothing, eyes lowered.

Jonathan pushed himself up after silence hit the room, and lifted the needle off the vinyl with an exasperated sigh. When he saw El’s expression, he abandoned the act. “Hey, I was just kidding,” he assured, reaching for her arm, but she flinched out of the way, flicking a startled glance at his hand before darting from the room. He started to move, but Will stopped him.

“I don’t think it was you,” he said. “It’s okay.”

When he followed her into his room – _their_ room, now – he found her digging through her duffel bag, tipping clothes out onto the floor in the process.

“El?”

“Nn,” she acknowledged, and then produced a battered and faded plaid shirt, holding it up for him to see. He looked between it and her, blank, and she said, “ _Hop_ ,” emphatically in an attempt to explain.

It was Hopper’s? Weren’t all of those shirts Hopper’s once? He shook his head and shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, I don’t…”

She huffed and smoothed it out onto the rug, covering most of the floorspace that was left in the room as she did. She jabbed a finger into the chest of it and stared him in the eyes, “First one. After the _bath_.”

He sat down across from her on the last bit of carpet. “It came into the Upside Down with you?” he asked. The clothes that had come in with him – they’d gone on a bonfire. Doctors’ advice. Destroying the trigger, they said. He hadn’t objected, even though among them was his once-favourite coat, because there _had_ been something funny about them, beyond the panic that started to bloom in his chest every time he wore them. It was like the texture was just a little bit off, no matter how many times you washed them. Some kind of layer of subliminal grime.

“Hop left me Eggos,” she told him. “In the woods.”

“But he couldn’t have known where you were,” he finished, eyes widening as he began to understand. “Everyone thought you were gone, or, or in the Upside Down. So the shirt – it helped you connect to him? Through the void?”

She nodded, placed her hand palm-down on the shirt, like she was leaving an imprint of charcoal. So there was still a piece of Hopper in the world, and El was connected to him already. Like the length of invisible wire that seemed to stretch between him and her sometimes, a connection that sent faint vibrations through radios in other dimensions. They hadn’t even known each other when the link had been formed, they were just two scared kids in a space between worlds. There had to be something like that for her and Hopper, he was her _dad_ , and if they could just find the thread that lead to him—

They set to work.

El tied the blindfold around her head, and searched for the shirt with her fingers. Will helped the collar into her hands, and then handed her the tiger teddy. He clutched King close, because it felt like the right thing to do, and tried to make his breath silent in order to keep her concentration. He didn’t know how far she’d have to reach, and with her batteries so drained by the bite…

“Breathe, Will,” she reminded him.

He forced air down into his lungs. “Right. Sorry.” Then winced at his apology, at the way this summer had made all those guilty feelings bubble back up to the surface. He breathed, and let the feeling pass. Like Mom showed him.

El’s hands had slacked slightly, but the shirt and the tiger were still close to her. He let minutes crackle by in radio static, watched a drop of blood trail down to her upper lip, before he let his worry seep to the surface enough to ask, “El?”

“Looking,” she said, and lapsed back into silence, wiping her sleeve roughly across her nose. He resolved to trouble her no further, and took his paper and pencils onto the floor with a hardback book. The scratch of the graphite blended in nicely with the white noise on the radio.

* * *

She wasn’t supposed to feel the blood running. In the void, there was only the dark and the quiet. It was dark. It was even quiet, except for the static that was supposed to lull her into senselessness. But the rug she was sitting on didn’t come out from under her. Her hands didn’t come suddenly free while Hop’s shirt and Sara’s tiger turned to smoke. And she could still feel the blood trickling out of her nose.

She tried. She thought and thought and thought, but it was like she couldn’t think in that direction any more. It was blocked. Like snapping shut the valves of a heart and feeling it try to pump in vain. She moved her eyes back and forth beneath her eyelids and the blindfold as if she could look in the right direction and find him, suddenly, waiting for her.

She didn’t know how long it took for her to start crying. First the tears were caught by the fabric over her face, and then her eyes began to sting from the saltwater leaking back into them. Her breath started to hitch, and then to shudder, and she felt hands suddenly slip into hers. She gasped, but it was just Will, and she knew that before he spoke her name and asked her what was wrong.

Footsteps smacked the carpet as the door swung open, and then the blindfold was coming off, letting her eyes breathe fresh air, and she couldn’t see from the tears but she could feel Joyce’s arms around her, rocking her.

“Shhhshshshhh, it’s okay, shhh, it’s okay, sweetie, I’ve got you, you’re alright…”

She had several false starts before she managed to hiccup, “I tried…”

“I know, honey, I know, it’s okay, shhshshh…”

“I tried but I couldn’t find him and I couldn’t and I tried…”

When the radio static is the only noise in the room again, Joyce asks Will to fetch her a glass of water, and she mumbles a protest that isn’t really a word, gripping tighter to his hand. She hadn’t realised she’d still been holding it, but it was there. _He_ was there.

Will smiled at her.

“This is us,” he said later, smacking his drawing down on the coffee table and quickly scribbling in the last dash of colour on his self-portrait’s t-shirt before pointing to it. “And this,” he plucked a red pencil from his collection and started to colour along an invisible line, “is the string.” He picked orange next. Then yellow. Green, blue, purple, pink, she projected. A spectrum of colour that appeared in all white light. She nodded at Joyce, who was frowning.

“And you can see this?” she asked.

El shook her head, and tried to demonstrate the feeling with her hand, plucking an imaginary string. The confused creases on Joyce’s face deepened. She looked to Will for help with the words, but he was already getting up, opening a cabinet and pulling out a smallish box. He took something out, little and cylindrical, and handed El the end of a piece of thin white thread, pinched between two fingers.

“It’s like we can feel the vibrations,” he explained, plucking the string once, and stopped it before it could settle on its own. There was a pause, and then he plucked again, in a pattern. Dot-dash-dot-dot. E-L. She smiled at him, and he returned a secret-indulging grin before he looked back to his mom. “That’s how she could find me in the Upside Down. We thought, if she could find Hopper’s string again…”

Joyce closed her eyes and breathed out in one long, measured breath. She tried to smile, and tugged them both close, one under each arm. “I know it’s hard,” she said, voice cracking, and had to do another steady inhale. “But he’s not coming back. You won’t find him, not anywhere. Not even with a.. bath. And if he _were_ here… he wouldn’t want you to hurt yourselves trying to do the impossible. Okay? He’d want you safe.”

_“But right now I need you safe. This thing is after you. It’s not after me. D’you understand? Hey. I need you to understand.”_

His words, spoken softly. She hadn’t liked them, but she’d understood. She’d nodded. And friends – friends don’t lie. But she _hadn’t_ been safe, and Hopper hadn’t come back even though the Mind-Flayer hadn’t been after him and that just wasn’t _fair_.

“I can feel him,” she insisted. All collected around her chest, string tangled up in knots. She just had to straighten it out and follow it, _reach_ for him, and…

“Here?” Joyce placed a hand on her own chest, just below the collarbone. Over her heart. The exact place that El could feel him – she blinked, wondering if Joyce’s exposure to the Upside Down had given her some low-level psychic abilities, before her strained smile forced her to understand. It wasn’t a psychic ability at all, it was just…

Grief.

She shook her head, brow pinching while she tried to keep the tears in. Too many tears. She hated them. Hated them! She let Joyce’s one-armed embrace pull her in closer, buried her face into her collar. Her hugs were sharper, smaller, more verbal and less clumsy than Hop’s. She rubbed a comforting rhythm into her back and hushed her, while Will took her outstretched hand across his mom’s lap.

When the tears had soaked harmlessly into clothes and tissues, they stayed close on the sofa, El’s head resting on Joyce’s shoulder. She watched the hour hand on the clock inch closer to the 10.

* * *

Jonathan didn’t know why the plot of this week’s _Miami Vice_ had the whole rest of his family in tears, and he didn’t intend to ask. Mostly because he suspected it had more to do with the bloody tissues in the bin and the blue plaid shirt that El was using as a blanket.

Catching sight of Hopper’s record box again as he walked into his room, he shook his head. He was going to have to get El some real music. He sat down at his desk and tapped a blank page on his notepad with his pen, deciding to make her a new mixtape to welcome her to the family. He’d have to start basic, with something close enough to that horror show she was used to to feel familiar. One of the only things in there that was actually decent was Fleetwood Mac, so that was an option. A more recent album of theirs, maybe. He’d have to find a copy from somewhere. Maybe he’d ask Nancy if he could look through the Wheelers’ collection…

One thing was absolutely certain. He was _not_ going to let Jim Croce within ten feet of this mix.

* * *

There was this infernal ringing in his ears. Almost like a tune, the kind of tune that a little kid might bang out on a toy instrument on a loop for what felt like hours on end because they decided they liked it. Just a bar on repeat, over and over and over again. He tried to ignore it. He tried to warp the sequence into something else. Hum another song, tap out another rhythm, anything, but it wouldn’t go away. And if he made too much noise for too long, there were harsh bangs on the door of his cell and barked orders to _shut the hell up_. Not that he understood Russian, he just knew that’s what they were saying. Probably threatening him with this or that.

“It’s all getting pretty standard, really,” he’d slurred, around the bits of his face that were stinging or swelling. Squinted at his interrogator, who had a permanent scowl etched onto his face. Reminded him of his stepmother. “Can we change it up a little?”

Oh, yeah, they’d really liked _that_. He was so goddamn stupid. Now his ears were ringing and his left eye was swelled almost all the way shut. Broken ribs, too, he thought. Made it hurt to breathe, the breath whistling in and out of his nose. He lay down on the cold block of concrete he called home, and tried to convince himself he was exhausted enough to sleep.

Beat. Rest. Beat, held beat, beat-beat. It could be the opening chord of a song, plucked out on a guitar string. Vibrating down into the void of inky black unconsciousness, where the music couldn’t quite reach his ears. Or…

● / ● ▬ ● ●

E-L.

She was calling him. He stumbled along the bottom of a dark pit, towards the sound, towards her…

Oh, good. That’s it, get your hopes up nice and high. A Morse code message, instilled in the concussion that they beat into your thick skull. That’s just genius, Hop. Real grade-A detective work. Jesus.

He forced himself to stop blindly stumbling through the dark. El _what_? he asked, bitter. That wasn’t a message. It wasn’t an instruction or a status update. It was just a name. A name that basically defeated the purpose of using code in the first place, because what kind of government spies would they be if they didn’t know that El stood for Eleven?

● / ● ▬ ● ●

He sensed the vibrations through the string and felt along it, letting it lead him through the dark. He’d played the guitar in high school, for a bit. Or he’d tried. Learned a few chords, strummed out a couple of half-baked love songs for half-baked girlfriends. He recalled how his grandpa used to pluck away at the strings for no one’s benefit but his own, made music for the sake of making music instead of to impress some girl. He wished he’d reached that romantic ideal of musician where he didn’t really care about the romance anymore. That was probably irony, or something.

● / ● ▬ ● ●

Difficult to make a tune with just one string and no frets. Resorting to patterns of dots and dashes was all the poor musician at the other end of the string could manage. A call with no response. Poor guy. Hopper put his finger to the string and plucked, just to console them that somebody was out there, somebody was listening.

● ● ● ● / ▬ ▬ ●

H-P. Hopper. Or, if he timed it correctly with the other message…

● ● ● ● / ● / ● ▬ ● ● / ● ▬ ▬ ●

H-E-L-P.

He held his breath while he waited for their response. That dot, dot-dash-dot-dot that meant someone was listening, someone could hear him, somebody was coming to find him.

He felt four more dots, vibrating through him with force, and for just a second, the ringing in his ears matched that H. ● ● ● ●

Bang bang bang bang. It shook him again, and he snorted awake, oxygen shooting up his busted nose and making it sting like crazy. The metal of the door settled back to silence, and some sonofabitch shouted through the hatch, “хватит храпеть!”

“And a good fucking morning to you, too!” he yelled. He’d like to boom it, to shake all of those assholes to their goddamn knees with just his voice, but his throat is raw and he’s not even sure most of the words will make it through the steel to human ears. He pounds the floor once, and then props his back against the wall, and gives himself in to silence.


End file.
